Latex

From Motion Mountain Wiki

The Motion Mountain Book is typeset in Latex. From 1988 to today, I have been a semi-professional Latex user. Around the year 2000, Latex, a free program collection, was the best typesetting system available. Nevertheless, since 2011, Latex is not up to date any more. Latex has lost its lead because of a typical problem of software development: mismanagement. Here are a few details on this sad story. Maybe it can be brought to a good end?

Contents

Tex/Latex's glorious past

Tex/Latex was the best typesetting system up to the year 2000 approximately. It was free, allowed good mathematical typesetting, produced good quality pdf, and was programmable. Free macros for most typesetting issues are available. Many textbooks in mathematics and physics used and still use it. But then came Adobe Indesign. And Latex fell behind.